As computing technology has advanced, increasingly powerful mobile devices have become available. For example, smart phones have become commonplace. The mobility of such devices has resulted in different types of functionality being developed, such as email-related functionalities and battery-saving functionalities. Mobile device chipsets, including memory and displays, have all made significant improvements in efficiency over the past several years. Battery technology, however, has not kept up with the advancement of such mobile device components. With ever more powerful chipsets and larger screens, mobile devices' demand for energy continues to grow while battery capacity growth has been lagging behind.
Using email on a mobile device is now synonymous with using a smartphone. Users like to receive their emails on their mobile device as soon as the emails arrive on the server. Email-related functionalities are one of the major power drains on mobile device battery power. Over the life of a mobile device, synchronizing email is consistently the largest application-based background consumer of battery.
Emails can be received from the email server using push-type communication (the server pushes emails to the mobile device) and poll (or fetch)-type communication (the mobile device requests emails from the server). Each push or poll operation consumes energy from the device battery. A single push operation consumes about the same energy when pushing one or several emails. Similarly, a single poll operation consumes about the same energy when fetching one or several emails.
In a poll-type communication, the mobile device requests emails periodically from the server (e.g., every 5 minutes). In this regard, polling can be efficient in instances when the frequency of received emails is high (e.g., if the user receives 10 emails in 5 minutes, a single request to the server will fetch all 10 emails at the energy cost of receiving 1 email). However, polling drains energy from the device battery when the frequency of emails is low (e.g., if the user receives 10 emails a day, the mobile device will request for emails over 200 times a day but at most 10 requests will fetch emails, the remaining requests will fetch no emails).
In a push-type communication, the server pushes an email to the mobile device as soon as the email arrives on server. This type of communications may be efficient when the frequency of received emails is low (e.g. if 10 emails arrive at the email server, the mobile device will be notified only 10 times). Push-type communications, however, may be inefficient and drain more battery power in instances when the frequency of received emails is high (e.g., if the user receives 500 emails a day, the mobile device will be notified 500 times, using significant amount of battery power).
In this regard, device battery life may be negatively impacted under push or poll-type communications. There are many variables that determine the extent of the negative impact on the battery, which is directly proportional to the frequency of communication with the email server in addition to the amount of email the user receives. In this day and age of always up-to-date email, the negative impact email can have on the battery of a mobile device can be significant.